Shift from Representation to Participation and the Chaos Dynamics of a New Planetary Culture

Discussion

William Irwin Thompson:

"In this shift from representation to participation in a global medium of noise, one needs to recognize the paradoxically contradictory nature of a global ecology of mind composed of the distributive lattice of noetic polities. Representational space was constructed around a centre/periphery dimensionality; but participatory space is constructed around node/lattice circulations. Like a rocket with its small nose cone pointed to outer space, but all hell breaking loose in the other direction, the emergence of noetic polities is also characterized by a new dumbing-down in the mass-media. Queen Victoria and the neo-medievalism of Pugin, the Pre-Raphaelities, the Oxford Movement of Cardinal Newman, and the Arthurianism of Tennyson all served to camouflage the structure of Industrialization with the content of the Middle Ages. So now our new mathematical mentality of complex dynamical systems and our new global electronic technology are camouflaged with the mindlessness of comic book movies, rock music and pseudo ‘Country Music’, Clear Channel opinion radio, Creationism, and a general anti-scientific attitude. But just as the fire of the rocket and the navigation systems of the nose cone both serve to move the rocket away from Earth, so do the noetic polity and the new mass stupidity serve to take us away from the stability of the territorial nation-state into the chaos dynamics of a new planetary culture."

(http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.64.853&rep=rep1&type=pdf)